If a company says you have permission to spend money on something for a purpose, but employees are abusing that to spend money on something that clearly violates that stated purpose, that’s into fraud territory.

This is why I call it the soft fraud mentality: When people see some fraudulent spending and decide that it’s fine because they don’t think the policy is important.

Managers didn’t care. It didn’t come out of their budget.

It was the executives who couldn’t ignore all of the people hanging out in the common areas waiting for food to show up and then leaving with it all together, all at once. Then nothing changed after the emails reminding them of the purpose of the policy.

When you look at the large line item cost of daily food delivery and then notice it’s not being used as intended, it gets cut.

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master_crab 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This might come as a bit of a surprise to you, but most (really all) employees are in it for money. So if you are astonished that people optimize for their financial gain, that’s concerning. That’s why you implement rules.

If you start trying to tease apart the motivations people have even if they are following those rules, you are going to end up more paranoid than Stalin.

	▲	Aurornis 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> This might come as a bit of a surprise to you > So if you are astonished that people optimize for their financial gain, that’s concerning. I’m not “surprised” nor “astonished” nor do you need to be “concerned” for me. That’s unnecessarily condescending. I’m simply explaining how these generous policies come to and end through abuse. You are making a point in favor of these policies: Many will see an opportunity for abuse and take it, so employers become more strict.
	▲	alt227 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> but most (really all) employees are in it for money Yes, but some also have a moral conscience and were brought up to not take more than they need. If you are not one of these types of people, then not taking complete over advantage of an offer like free meals probably seems like an alien concept. I try to hire more people like this, it makes for a much stronger workforce when people are not all out to get whatever they can for themselves and look out for each others interests more.

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d4mi3n 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is disingenuous but soft-fraud is not a term I’d use for it. Fraud is a legal term. You either commit fraud or you do not. There is no “maybe” fraud—you comply with a policy or law or you don’t.

As you mentioned, setting policy that isn’t abused is hard. But abuse isn’t fraud—it’s abuse—and abuse is its own rabbit hole that covers a lot of these maladaptive behaviors you are describing.

	▲	Aurornis 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It’s called expense fraud. I call the meal expense abuse “soft fraud” because people kind of know it’s fraud, but they think it’s small enough that it shouldn’t matter. Like the “eh that’s fine” commenter above: They acknowledged that it’s fraud, but also believe it’s fine because it’s not a major fraud. If someone spends their employer’s money for personal benefit in a way that is not consistent with the policies, that is legally considered expense fraud. There was a case local to me where someone had a company credit card and was authorized to use it for filling up the gas tank of the company vehicle. They started getting in the habit of filling up their personal vehicle’s gas tank with the card, believing that it wasn’t a big deal. Over the years their expenses weren’t matching the miles on the company vehicle and someone caught on. It went to court and the person was liable for fraud, even though the total dollar amount was low five figures IIRC. The employee tried to argue that they used the personal vehicle for work occasionally too, but personal mileage was expensed separately so using the card to fill up the whole tank was not consistent with policy. I think people get in trouble when they start bending the rules of the expense policy thinking it’s no big deal. The late night meal policy confounds a lot of people because they project their own thoughts about what they think the policy should be, not what the policy actually is.
	▲	varjag 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Fraud is also used colloquially and it doesn't seem we're in a court of justice rn.